An American Pentagon official was explaining why the U.S. found it necessary to censor graphic footage from the Gulf war. He stated, "If we let people see that kind of a thing, there never would be war again."

The following is an excerpt from a letter that Robert E. Lee, the Confederate military leader in the American Civil war of 1864 wrote to his wife: "What a cruel thing is war: to separate and destroy families and friends, and mar the purest joys and happiness God has granted us in this world; to fill our hearts with hatred instead of love for our neighbors, and devastate the fair face of this beautiful world."

Recently [in 2010] an American soldier, Pvt Bradley Manning, a 22 year old intelligence analyst, has been arrested and is being held in confinement in Quantico, Virginia. He is awaiting trial as a suspect for revealing classified military videos and documents about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Even before his trial. A Congressman named Mike Rogers suggested that Manning should receive the death penalty! Apparently, these documents reveal some pretty horrible stuff.

Regardless of Pvt. Manning's alleged involvement in these classified documents [about 90,000 items or 200,000 pages], it all became public knowledge through the efforts of an Australian named Julien Assannge, who is the co-founder of the news media outlet, Wikileaks.

Assannge has received recognition from Amnesty International for his outstanding skill in exposing criminal activities -- one of those was revealing extrajudicial assassinations that had taken place in Kenya. When questioned about making the military documents public, Assannge replied, " When we look at the Officials Secrets Act labelled documents, we see that they state that it is an offence to retain the information and an offence to destroy the information -- so that the only possible outcome for us is to publish the information".

The voters in Canada, as in all democratic countries, are ultimately responsible for the people we elect to the federal government. We need to be certain that the politicians we choose will not involve our young men and women in wars of aggression in foreign lands where the main objective is to kill those whom our leaders have named as "the enemy".

The famous author Mark Twain, expressed this opinion about war: "Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime"